It's very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present.

Do you believe that someone out of the past can enter and take possession of a living being?

We may be true with the past, but the past is not through with us.

Welcome back to The Next Picture Show, a movie movie The Week podcast devoted to a classic film

in the way it's shaped our thoughts on a recent release. I'm Tasha Robinson, here again with

Scott Tobias and Keith Phipps. Genevieve is putting the finishing touches on a movie script

that she started this morning. I hear she just asked Chat GPT to write everything but the title,

and some venture capitalists have already

bought whatever comes out the other end. In our last episode, we talked about Federico Felini's

1963 classic 8.5, about a famed director who's contracted to make a science fiction epic

and has a cast, a set, and a 260-foot-tall rocket ship, but no script and no idea what he wants

to say. We'll come back to him

in a bit, but first, let's talk about the modern movie that seems like an AI-era spin on the same

idea. Dracula from Romanian writer-director Radujude of bad luck banging or loony porn, and do not

expect too much from the end of the world, a recent next picture show hit.

In the film, a director played by Adonis Tanta sets out to design a new Dracula blockbuster movie by feeding screenplay requests into an affable but creatively bankrupt AI, which spits out

ideas that we watch play out on the screen. Chewed up regurgitations of Coppola's Dracula

and F.W. Murnaw's version, terrible AI animation,

artless interpretations of the word vampire with no relationship to Bram Stoker's version,

and eventually outright cartoon pornography. As the critic hired by Guido in eight and a half to analyze

his film would say, it's a series of gratuitous episodes with minimal connecting threads,

amusing in their questionable realism.

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